What can I use to generate a local XML file?

Question

I have a project that I am working on and I do not know much about Rails or Ruby.

I need to generate an XML file from user input. Can some direct me to any resource that can show me how to do this pretty quickly and easily?

Answer 1

The Nokogiri gem has a nice interface for creating XML from scratch. It's powerful while still easy to use. It's my preference:

require 'nokogiri'
builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do |xml|
  xml.root {
    xml.products {
      xml.widget {
        xml.id_ "10"
        xml.name "Awesome widget"
      }
    }
  }
end
puts builder.to_xml

Will output:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <products>
    <widget>
      <id>10</id>
      <name>Awesome widget</name>
    </widget>
  </products>
</root>

Also, Ox does this too. Here's a sample from the documenation:

require 'ox'

doc = Ox::Document.new(:version => '1.0')

top = Ox::Element.new('top')
top[:name] = 'sample'
doc << top

mid = Ox::Element.new('middle')
mid[:name] = 'second'
top << mid

bot = Ox::Element.new('bottom')
bot[:name] = 'third'
mid << bot

xml = Ox.dump(doc)

# xml =
# <top name="sample">
#   <middle name="second">
#     <bottom name="third"/>
#   </middle>
# </top>